After downloading the R sources you should also download the recommended
packages by entering the R source tree and running

tools/rsync-recommended

from a shell command line.

The above archives are created automatically from the Subversion tree,
hence might not even compile on your platform and can contain any number
of bugs. They will probably work, but maybe not. Use them to verify
whether a bug you're tracking has been fixed or a new feature you always
wanted has already been implemented.

CRAN itself does no longer mirror source snapshots (as of 2001-11-14),
because it makes only limited sense to propagate archives that change
on a daily basis through a network of mirror sites. When a snapshot
reaches one of the final nodes in the mirroring process, there are
already 2 newer versions available at the orginal sites.